 “The path of obedience to God is simple, yet often the hardest road to walk—requiring both trust and surrender.”– Unknown |
Hello and welcome back to another article. You thought I was going to fall into the usual pattern and leave you hanging again huh? Well hopefully this year is the year of consistency and new beginnings where I will try my best (by God’s grace) to keep this train choo-chooing.
This particular article is a testament to how God has a great sense of humor. I have always said that the words that I write here minister to me first before they go out into this world to do what they do. Or sometimes they minister to me later when I go through seasons where those words make sense and resonnate. But one thing is for sure, these words are also for me. And this article here is not any different. It is almost midnight, and as I type those words I am exhausted. After a very long day, my plan was to wrap up the day and start unwinding to go to bed but God had a simple instruction for me: put those words in writing. Simple right? Right. However just because the instruction was simple, doesn’t mean it wasn’t hard to execute. The tiredness in my body made it hard for me to walk in obedience but here we are.
As I was going about my day today, God had already started to plant the seed of what this article was going to be about. He led me into the book of 2 kings 5 which narrates the story of how Naaman, a very influential man got healed but almost missed out on his miracle because the instruction was too simple for his liking. Long story short (you should really read for yourself): Naaman had leprosy, one of his servant (a young girl) said : “hey, there is a Prophet in Samaria, he would heal my master if he would just go see him”. Naaman took that information to the king and the king gave him permission to go. Once Naaman went to Samaria, he was expected to be received by Elisha with the highest honors but to his dismay, Elisha didn’t even come out to see him: he sent someone else to give him the instruction that would unlock his miracle. He got upset and wanted to return home but “But his officers tried to reason with him and said, ‘Sir, if the prophet had told you to do something very difficult, wouldn’t you have done it? So you should certainly obey him when he says simply, ‘Go and wash and be cured!’. So Naaman went down to the Jordan River and dipped himself seven times, as the man of God had instructed him. And his skin became as healthy as the skin of a young child, and he was healed!” (2 kings 5: 13-14)
This is a perfect example of how we miss out on miracles because we judge God’s instruction too simplistic and yet, there is a hidden hardship in it: the test of obedience. As humans, we all for the most part, are wired to like a challenge and to question the simple stuff. And that is where the difficulty is for us. We tend to associate simple with ease when most of the time, they couldn’t be further away from each other because of our sinful nature, because of pride or because life experiences have skewed our view of of life (“it cannot be that easy”, “that’s a trap”, “what is the catch?”, etc…)
We are so used to the hard things that the simplicity of God in the way he requires for us to do things throws us in for a loop. But it is really as we sit and practice what He is asking of us or go from a place of hearing to doing, that we realize that the simple things are in fact not easy and require from us humility and the grace of God in order to obey and take hold of our miracles. Sometimes, we miss out because the miracle does not come wrapped in the packaging we want or it does not look like a rubic’s cube. And so we overlook it or look at what God is presenting to us as the blueprint as beneath us, when in fact, it does come with the perfect level of challenge that we need to rise to the next level. As someone that has been in the biotech industry for years now and that has worked in the lab, big repairs are important but it is the fine tuning and calibration of instruments that makes a big and noticeable difference in the quality of the output. And sometimes, the “simple things” that God requires from us are the things that produce the difference that we so long for.
“So what are you saying?” What I am saying is : sometimes it is not about praying for two hours or fasting 40 days. Yes they are great things to practice, however, if they do not come from and align with obedience, I am afraid you are missing the point. I will leave you with this: if you are have been praying and asking God : “Lord what’s next?” And what you have been hearing from God is either the same instruction or crickets, make sure you stop, go back and check that you have done the last thing God has asked you to do. And if you think it is too simple, maybe you are missing the point again. It is not about how simple or complicated it is, it is about our pride and how hard it is to submit to God because we think we are above certain things. The fine tuning of the heart posture is the most important process a believer can go through because the posture of the heart determines the outcomes of a lot of things in life (prov 4:23)
I pray and hope these words blessed you in the ways God intended for them to.
Until next time,
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